Bread Machine Love & Recipe Review: Cinnamon Rolls

As part of my domestic cooking endeavors, I've been wanting to make some homemade baked goods, especially breads and doughs. Not only is it less expensive to make your own, but you're free of the weird chemicals and preservatives too. I've found out that I'm not the best at doing that by hand...too impatient and not precise with water temps & yeast. So I decided I wanted to try a Bread Machine.

My MIL let me borrow her machine that was collecting dust somewhere in her basement. I liked it and had some success, but I rarely wanted to make something and actually bake it in the bread machine. Mostly I was finding recipes for doughs to be made in the machine, then pulled out and baked in a different way (pizza dough, rolls, cinnamon buns, etc). Many bread machines have a "Dough" setting, unfortunately MIL's did not so I had to constantly check on it. So I decided I needed wanted a bread machine with a Dough cycle.

I started perusing and found out that these machines are NOT cheap. I found some for more than $200 - yikes! The cheapest I found was a $60 machine on sale at Walmart for $45. I almost bought it. Came thisclose. But I had a hard time justifying spending $45 when I had a perfectly good machine at home (just no dough cycle).

Exactly one week later, the heavens shone down upon me in a Goodwill. I found this perfectly good, compact bread machine for $7.99 and it had a DOUGH CYCLE!!!

After plugging it in to make sure it still worked, this baby went home with me. I cleaned it up this week, downloaded the manual online, and decided my first endeavor should be Cinnamon Rolls. I used this recipe from Good (&Cheap) Eats. FishMama is a big believer in Bread Machines and has a great post with quite a few recipes here. Here the Cinnamon Rolls are before I baked them this morning. No after photos...I don't want to display the carnage that went on! Needless to say, they were TASTY!

Surprise! These are made with wheat flour and old-fashioned oats in them. Gotta do something to amp up their nutritional value with the butter and sugar that's in these!

The icing calls for Powdered Sugar. I don't keep Powdered Sugar on hand and don't use it because it has corn starch in it (I'm allergic to corn). I found a great post over at the Pioneer Woman's Tasty Kitchen on how to make you own Powdered Sugar. It is SO EASY and CORN FREE!

After seeing many recommendations for The Bread Lover's Bread Machine Cookbook on various blogs, I checked it out from the library this week. I plan on trying out a few recipes to decide if I buy it - want to make sure it's worth it. I'll let you know how some of those go!

I've linked up to Frugal Friday over at Life As Mom since I'm so proud of my frugal Bread Machine Purchase!